Shadow Puppets Page 0,59

was just a bonus. It was about getting Bean's babies.

Bean knew they hadn't been followed here. They had been betrayed since arriving. Volescu. And if Volescu was in on it, then the embryos that were stolen probably had Anton's Key after all. There was no particular reason for anyone to want his babies if there wasn't at least a chance that they would be prodigies of the kind Bean was.

Volescu's screening test was probably a fraud. Volescu probably had no idea which of the embryos had Anton's Key and which didn't. They'd implant them in surrogates and then see what happened when they were born.

Bean had been taken in by Volescu as surely as Peter had been by Achilles. But it wasn't as if they had trusted Volescu. They had simply trusted him not to be in league with Achilles.

Though it didn't have to be him. Just because he had kidnapped Ender's jeesh didn't mean that he was the only would-be kidnapper in the world. Bean's children, if they had his gifts, would be coveted by any ambitious nation or would-be military leader. Raise them up knowing nothing about their real parents, train them here on Earth as intensely as Bean and the other kids had been trained in Battle School, and by the age of nine or ten you can put them in command of strategy and tactics.

It might even be an entrepreneurial scheme. Maybe Volescu did this alone, hiring gunmen, bribing the security guard, so that he could sell the babies later to the highest bidder.

"Bad news, sorry," said the man in the back seat. "But you still got one baby, yes? In wife, yes?"

"Still the one," said Bean. If they had the ordinary amount of good luck.

Which didn't seem to be the trend at the moment.

Still, going to Damascus. If Alai was really taking them into his protection, Petra would be safe there. Petra and perhaps one child-who might have Anton's Key after all, might be doomed to die without ever seeing the age of twenty. At least those two would be safe.

But the others were out there, children of Bean's and Petra's who would be raised by strangers, as tools, as slaves.

There had been nine embryos. One had been implanted, and three were discarded. That would leave five in the possession of Volescu or Achilles or whoever it was who took them.

Unless Volescu had actually found a way to switch the three that were supposedly discarded, switching containers somehow. There might be eight embryos unaccounted for but probably not, probably only the five they knew about. Bean and Petra had both been watching Volescu too carefully for him to get away with the first three, hadn't they?

By force of will, Bean turned his thoughts away from worries he could do nothing about at this moment, and took stock of his situation.

"Thank you," said Bean to the men in the car. "I was careless. Without you, I'd be dead."

"Not careless," said the man in the back. "Young man in love. Wife has baby in her Time of hope."

Followed immediately, Bean realized, by a time of near despair He should never have agreed to father children, no matter how much Petra wanted to, no matter how much he loved Petra, no matter how much he too yearned for offspring, for a family. He should have stood firm, because then this would not have been possible. There would have been nothing for his enemies to steal from him. He and Petra would still have been in hiding, undetected, because they would never have had to go to a snake like Volescu.

"Babies good," said the man in the back. "Make you scared, make you crazy. Somebody take away babies, somebody hurt babies, make you crazy. But good anyway. Babies good."

Yeah. Well. Maybe Bean would live long enough to know about that, and maybe he wouldn't.

Because now he knew his life's work, for whatever time he had left before he died of giantism.

He had to get his babies back. Whether they should ever have existed or not, they existed now, each with its own separate genetic identity, each very much alive. Until they were taken, they had been nothing to him but cells in a solution-all that mattered was the one that would be implanted in Petra, the one that would grow and become part of their family. But now they all mattered. Now they were all alive to him, because someone else had them, meant to use them.

He even regretted